If you let love in, love annihilates. Love requires one to die over and over again. Old habits, ideas of who you are, false programming, assumptions, fantasies about yourself and the other cannot pass muster in these times. Relationships end if they are held together by mere fantasies. If life is showing you these cracks and vulnerabilities in your relationships, good. You are lucky. Life is not allowing you to live half-heartedly. Life does not want you to settle for less than true love.

Love is not always soft and nurturing, it can be violent, uncompromising, even terrifying. (Violent not as in physical violence — but a kind of violence that does not allow you comforting half-truths, and does not attempt to coddle). We can spend our whole lives running away from love, but what we are really doing is running away from life — and ourselves.

In order to know true love, one has to move past the deception that love is something that is only found outside of ourselves, or only exclusively in romantic relationships. That is the type of love that always keeps you wanting, searching, and empty in search of fulfillment.

True love lies in the consciousness that you ARE love.

We are afraid of what awaits at the end of the high, of the honeymoon, of the dwindling light. What awaits in the dark? The abandoned parts of ourselves that we have shunned and rejected, deemed unworthy of love.

When we search perennially for another to love us, what we are really saying is:

“Love the parts of me I cannot love. Show me that it is okay to love the parts of me that I can’t even bear to look at. Show me that I am okay.”

And for that, I have seen people do anything, absolutely anything for that approval. For that signal that we are finally okay, that we are finally worthy of love now.

But inevitably, we will be crushed. We will be heartbroken. Because no one else can love us perfectly, the way we are meant to be loved — by ourselves, first and foremost. Because love is about wholeness, not about looking for that missing piece: it is about accepting our imperfections, and not just accepting them, but holding them in tenderness, in compassion for our own humanity. And no longer turning away out of shame, rejection or despair.

Where is the love? I hear people question. Do you believe in love? As though love is just a mere concept. And it shall remain a mere concept, if one does not move beyond holding oneself in judgement, in separation, in contempt.

In order to be the love that you are, and for that love to be reflected back to you in relationship, you have to start gently excavating the lost, the rejected, the broken, the ugly parts of yourself, hold them up to the light, start to know them, accept them, and say “I see you. It is okay. Just be.”